The Employee Benefits Security Administration’s revamped enforcement priorities also set time limits for its investigations. The new enforcement standards coincide with a nearly 30% decrease in the DOL division’s employees over the past year.
By Beagan Wilcox Volz
FT Specialist (April 16, 2026) — The Department of Labor division responsible for safeguarding the assets in more than 800,000 retirement plans on Tuesday announced an overhaul of its enforcement priorities.
Daniel Aronowitz, the head of the Employee Benefits Security Administration who authored the guidance, wrote that he now expects agency staff — including the director of enforcement — to inform him of “all proposed significant enforcement activities.”
Aronowitz said he wants two weeks’ notice before any actions are taken in such cases and settlements.
Significant enforcement actions include ones that deviate from previous EBSA positions as well as ones that are based on novel legal theories or venture into new areas of enforcement, the guidance notes. Cases that are likely to result in a split in interpretation of the law among appellate courts also qualify as significant.
“The senior review requirement for significant actions … centralizes enforcement authority in a way that previous administrations did not,” Anne Tyler Hall, managing partner at Hall Benefits Law, wrote in an email.
The goal of this change is to “ensure consistency of enforcement across all regions,” the EBSA bulletin states.
The Securities and Exchange Commission made a similar move about year ago, when its commissioners voted 2-1 to end “the delegation of authority to issue formal orders of investigation,” the final rule release stated.
EBSA’s updated enforcement priorities also set for the first time specific limits on the length of investigations, Hall said.
Routine investigations, such as inquiries into disclosure violations, should be completed within 18 months, unless issues arise that are communicated to EBSA’s enforcement director, according to the guidance.
More complex investigations should be wrapped up within 30 months, Aronowitz wrote.
“To ensure that EBSA’s investigations are timely and responsive, the director of enforcement (or designee) must conduct quarterly reviews of any civil investigation that has remained open longer than the timeframes … and take appropriate corrective action to ensure that EBSA is meeting this enforcement priority,” the guidance states.
The director of enforcement is also tasked with reporting investigations to Aronowitz that are running longer than those timeframes, the guidance notes.
This part of the guidance appears aimed at “creating internal accountability,” Hall wrote.
Aronowitz said during a June hearing that, if confirmed, he planned to end “the practice of open-ended investigations that go on for years.”
The Senate confirmed him to the role in September. Aronowitz previously founded and led a fiduciary liability insurer, Encore Fiduciary.
The new enforcement standards coincide with a nearly 30% decrease in the DOL division’s employees over the past year.
EBSA’s enforcement abilities are “severely diminished,” a group of former officials recently wrote in a letter to House legislators.
The guidance also states that EBSA will prioritize criminal cases “to address the most significant harm to the employee benefits system.”
With respect to civil cases, the DOL division will prioritize investigations where there appear to be breaches of the Employee Retirement Income Security Act’s duty of loyalty.
Such cases include ones where individuals and firms act to enrich themselves or pursue goals “unrelated to participants’ best interests, such as the promotion of environmental, social or governance objectives,” the guidance states.
EBSA also “must avoid cases that unfairly second-guess process-based fiduciary judgments,” according to the guidance.
EBSA recovered $1.4 billion in fiscal year 2025, roughly the same amount as the prior year, the division reported.
The division closed 878 civil investigations in 2025, and it referred 75 of them for litigation. That compares to 729 civil investigations closed the previous year, with 53 referred for litigation.
EBSA does not appear to disclose how many investigations it opens each year.
